


The City Electric

by fathomfive



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, M/M, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 12:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20966804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fathomfive/pseuds/fathomfive
Summary: Even under the eye of the Machine, New York's labyrinths always have more places to hide.  John learned them when he was homeless, and after that you never quite forget.We’re walking in the shadows, Kara had said to him.  At the time he’d just thought she meant the inevitability of getting your hands dirty for the greater good, but—there’s this, too.  You can vanish from the world without really dying.  You can gain entry to the places in between what is and what might be.  Joan knew the trick.  It’s possible that everyone who does learned it the hard way.





	The City Electric

It’s two in the morning and John is sitting on a rooftop overlooking the river. He’s bleeding sluggishly from a bullet graze. The night is muggy, breathless, and the million small sounds of the city seem muffled. The Brooklyn Bridge stretches like a bridal train of lights over the water.

Finch is talking in his ear, something about the architectural history of the neighborhood. John’s not really following. He presses a wadded handkerchief to his wound and waits to be told that his escape route is clear. He didn’t ask for the history lesson, but there are worse ways to kill time. Finch’s voice surrounds him.

Tonight, as always, Finch himself is half a city away, safely ensconced in the library. John imagines him there: hands resting neatly in front of him on the desk. Tucked up, that straight posture, mother-of-pearl buttons glinting in the half-light.

He thinks, _I want to go home_.

“Mr. Reese,” Finch says, interrupting his own monologue. “The police have completed their street-level sweep. You’re free to move.”

“Any chance they scooped up Russo while they were at it?” John says.

“None, I’m afraid,” Finch says, and a bitter edge enters his voice. “And even if they had, there’s no evidence to hold him on. Not yet.”

Don Russo is their newest number, and after tonight’s excitement, John’s pretty confident they can label him a perpetrator. He adjusts the pressure on his wound and forces himself to his feet.

“Then we’d better hurry up and figure out who he means to kill,” he says, and makes for the fire escape.

At the edge of the roof he stops and grips the railing. Below him is a gaping darkness that defies the space around it, dropping down and down with no bottom in sight. He exhales hard. His head swims.

“Mr. Reese,” Finch says. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

John squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them, the darkness below the fire escape resolves itself into grimy asphalt and a pile of old cardboard. “Nothing I can’t patch up by myself,” he says.

“I’m sure,” Finch says. And then, too briskly for it to be casual, “Maybe you ought to take care of it at the library anyway. It’s closer, after all, and I’d feel better if—”

“Okay,” John says, and starts climbing.

He has questions for Finch that he doesn’t know how to ask. Some of them are soft things he can’t bear to say—never could, that’s why Jessica slipped out of his hands the first time.

The others he bites back because he doesn’t want to sound like he’s gone insane. But right now, when the world is off-kilter and dark, they gather on the tip of his tongue.

_Do you know there’s something strange about this city? Someone told me once that we’re walking in the dark. That we can never go back to the light. But what about the places in between? _

_I’ve been there, Harold. Have you?_

Last April, a few months after Jessica’s death, John saw something he didn’t tell anyone else about. Sleeping rough was taking its toll on him, and for three days he lay in a fever on a park bench, sweating and shaking. People were moving around him, and their voices came to him as though over a great distance, but as the night came on they vanished. It was quiet.

He lay staring at a pair of stone lions that sat on either side of the path. A little further down, the path vanished into a bower of evergreens. He could only see it when he craned his neck to look, and he didn’t like to look because the dark entry in the trees seemed to swim with lightless movement. He was hot and cold all at once. He felt invisible, anchorless, as though he’d slipped sideways out of time.

He was not particularly surprised when the stone lions rose and stretched. They looked down the path, behind where John lay, and bowed with their front legs extended, their stone joints grinding. He couldn’t turn his head to look but he knew something was passing along the path beside him. He heard footsteps, slow and even. They went past him and into the dark space inside the bower.

The lions raised their heads, and crossed the path to take up one another’s places. Dust puffed from their stone flanks, suspended in the moonlight—they seemed realer than anything John had encountered in daytime. He kept from blinking for as long as he could, watching them. Then the wind picked up, driving clouds across the moon, and they were only stone again.

He didn’t go back to that park.

He never saw statues move again, but sometimes Joan would tell him stories about the bronze Shakespeare of Central Park. He saw faces that weren’t there in the reflections in subway windows. And he heard things, snatches of conversation when no one was around, like his head was a radio and someone was spinning the dials. Around him the city heaved and sighed, muttered and bled and wept.

Once he had Finch around to talk to, the city kept its voices to itself. He was newly sober and ready to stop thinking about them. But sometimes, when they walked together late at night, Finch would turn his head as if listening to a voice far off. It could be he had another channel open. It could be he was listening to the Machine.

Or it could be that if John told him what he’d seen, told him what he thought about New York, Finch would understand.

Now he makes his way back to the library. He nearly starts when he sees Finch standing at the top of the marble staircase, half in shadow.

“What kind of time do you call this, hmm?” Finch says. His tone is mild but his expression is intent, like he’s scrutinizing John to make sure he’s the same as when they last met. He’s got his coat on and the first aid kit in his hand.

“Lost my watch,” John says, equally mild. He’s stuck on the fact that Finch was apparently leaving to find him. “I’ll make it up to you.”

Back in the stacks, Bear comes and leans against his legs while he cleans and bandages his graze. Finch hands him antiseptic, tape, gauze, never losing his focus but never getting close enough to touch the wound either. Finally John waves him off.

“If it stresses you out, you don’t have to watch,” he says. “Any more leads on Russo?”

Finch looks at him a moment longer and then moves away. He sinks into his chair and lets his shoulders drop. “Unfortunately not,” he says. “I’ll be staying a little later, but I don’t expect there will be much more to occupy you.”

“That’s all right,” John says. “I’ll catch up on my reading.”

Finch offers him one of those minute smiles he’s come to look forward to. Then he turns toward his monitors again.

John settles in the worn green chair by the window and runs his thumb along the stack of books on the side table. He tends to pick something on a whim and stick with it, reading through whether he’s particularly interested or not. Finch is more ruthless in his disapproval, stuffing books back onto the shelves when they bore him, but he usually has three or four going at once. John slides his own out of the stack and flips to the dogeared page:

_Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else._

For a while it’s just the sound of keys tapping and pages turning. After another hour Finch pushes back from his computer and comes up for air. He drops his shoulders and rolls his neck, like he’s forgotten he’s not alone. John shuts his book and presses it between flat palms, to keep his hands from moving of their own accord. He wants to reach out and rub Finch’s shoulders until they don’t hurt him anymore.

Bear gets up, sensing a walk in the near future. John leashes him while Finch puts on his coat (while he watches Finch put on his coat) and they step out into the city together.

After they part ways, John will double back and follow Finch. In the months that John’s been doing this, Finch has never taken the same route twice. And each time, John loses him somewhere amid tenements or noodle shops or streets lit by bar neon.

Finch has never raised an objection, so John likes to think of it as a game they play. But his head still doesn’t feel right, so when he loses the trail this time he doesn’t try too hard to find it again. He stops to get his bearings and then heads for home.

The apartment Finch gave him is isolated, defensible, upscale but not extravagant: enough happy mediums that Finch must have thought it all through quite carefully. Must have tried to provide the things he thought would make John comfortable—must have imagined him living here.

John thinks about that a lot.

At this time of night, the only noise is a radio in an open window next door. John listens, on the edge of sleep, to talk and music half drowned in static. Headlights glide across the curtained windows. That night he has an unpleasant dream.

He’s with Kara in a hotel room in Paris, bleeding heavily from his nose, and she’s trying to tell him something he doesn’t want to hear. Blood runs down his lips and chin. When she has told him the secret, he’ll never look at Paris the same way again.

“Listen,” Kara says, and then she turns into Finch. In the dream, he is not surprised by this, only resigned. “Listen, there’s something you need to know about the city.”

“I already know,” he says, and wakes up because his phone is ringing.

“I do hope you were able to get some sleep,” Finch says. “You’re going to need it. I’ve tracked down Mr. Russo’s intended victim.”

This turns out to be Lee Brighton, a bookie from Queens who lost an obscene amount of Russo’s money on an ill-advised bet. John makes his acquaintance in a hail of gunfire behind his apartment building. Brighton is surprisingly philosophical about the whole thing: while they cower next to a dumpster and stray shots knock chips of cement off the building, he gives John his personal treatise on luck.

“If you ask me, the universe is a, a net,” he says, making a shape with his hands. John grunts and reloads. He didn’t ask. “A net with all of us woven in. Everything’s connected to everything else.”

There’s a lull in the gunfire.

“Shots have been reported,” Finch says over the comm. “At least two squad cars are heading in your direction.” John hauls Brighton down the alley into an adjoining parking lot. They duck behind a gray sedan just before the shots start coming again.

“Every action has its, you know, equal and opposite reaction,” Brighton says. “Pull a string here, catch vibrations here—it’s all about potential energy. I’ve seen long odds change someone’s whole life, and that kinda stuff doesn’t come out of nowhere. Every one of us moves the universe.”

“Interesting,” John says, testing the car door. It’s unlocked. He throws it open for a shield and fires through the window, and glass rains down on his shoulders. Someone screams. “So you bet a college fund’s worth of cash on a racehorse named Punchdrunk Sly because of…karma?”

“Causality,” Harold hums.

“_Blessing_,” Lee Brighton says, with a fanatic light in his eye. “It just wasn’t my time yet. But it will be, wait and see.”

John grabs him by the collar. “Time to go,” he says.

They hide in the drinks aisle of a bodega while squad cars go howling past. John can hear Finch typing in the background, and the noise of his police scanner behind that. Listening in on half-heard chatter, he’s reminded of last night’s dream. Someone was about to tell him something important.

“Finch—” he says, without thinking. The fluorescent lights make their surroundings seem suddenly unreal, a little too sharp and fine.

“Yes, Mr. Reese?” Finch says. He sounds terribly opaque all of a sudden, unreadable and far away.

“—Exit strategy,” John says, after a long pause. Finch is silent on the other end of the line. For a moment John could buy into Brighton’s whole theory: it feels like a thread has drawn taut between the two of them, vibrating with unspoken things. The wound in his side throbs dully.

The bell on the bodega door jingles and crashes to the ground. The door slams into a magazine rack, the cashier shouts, and John knows they’re out of time. He and Brighton head for the storage room, and while John heaves a desk in front of the door, Brighton starts jimmying the back window.

“There are four more men closing in from the cross-street,” Finch says. “You can’t go back the way you came.” John boosts Brighton out the window and then climbs out himself, flattening his back to the grimy wall.

“What are our options?” he says, even as he’s running the possibilities in his head. They’re almost surrounded, and the men they’re dealing with don’t worry about collateral damage. A rooftop would be suicide. Street level is the way out, but only if they can move fast enough.

There’s another way. It’s one he hasn’t thought about for a long time.

“Hey, Finch,” he says. “You remember Joan?” Brighton gives him a blank look.

“You need to get moving before any remaining avenues of escape are closed,” Finch says, tense.

“I know,” John says. “Listen. Harold, listen. I have a plan. You might not be able to find me for a little while.”

“What?” Finch says. Brighton shoots John an urgent glance, and John peers around the corner of the building. It’s easier not to explain what he’s planning. When the way looks clear, he ducks into the light flow of foot traffic, and Brighton follows.

John almost misses the door. Joan showed it to him a little while after they first met, when they were spotted by a couple of cops on the prowl. It had been at dusk, her thin hand clamped around his wrist as she pulled him into the shadow of a sky bridge. She walked with fast birdlike steps, head down, not looking back. There was a faded poster peeling from the concrete piling under the bridge.

“Shh,” she said to him, and pulled the poster back. She stepped into the dark space behind. Even though some part of him wanted to round on those cops and show them just what they were dealing with, he followed.

This is where he takes Brighton now.

“What is this?” Brighton asks, as John yanks him toward the blackness under the bridge. Behind the poster is a yawning darkness, a square cut out of negative space.

“I have to second the question,” Finch says. “What, exactly, are you—”

“Shh,” John says.

Stepping through the door is like plunging face-first into tepid water. He hears Brighton’s sharp intake of breath, but nothing else, and strides forward as fast as he can manage in the blackness. It smells like rust and rain and, here and there, of the ocean. There’s nothing but silence in his earpiece.

_We’re walking in the shadows_, Kara had said to him. At the time he’d just thought she meant the inevitability of getting your hands dirty for the greater good, but—there’s this, too. You can vanish from the world without really dying. You can gain entry to the places in between what is and what might be. Joan knew the trick. It’s possible that everyone who does learned it the hard way.

When Joan had led him here, he wasn’t sure how long the passage lasted. His internal clock was good, but something about this cool lightless place made it almost impossible to count distance or time. This time, he follows his vague memories. When a faint light appears up ahead, he makes for it.

He and Lee Brighton emerge at the foot of a sunken staircase, looking up at an empty street. Water beads on benches and windows and sparkles in the puddles, and the sound of the river is everywhere. There’s no one else in sight. Light seems to stream forth from all directions.

Brighton stares. “It was afternoon,” he said. “Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it afternoon?” He slows on the steps and John puts a hand on his back and pushes.

“It still is afternoon, where we came from,” he says. “Keep moving. Don’t run but don’t stop. Whatever you do, we _cannot_ stop here.” He shoves past Brighton and scans the street: still empty.

John keeps walking. He walks as fast as he can, ignoring Brighton’s complaints, leading them toward the place where the western horizon should be. They pass buildings with no shadows, and shadows where no buildings stand. The sound of the river fails to get any closer or any farther away. When he realizes Brighton isn’t close enough behind him, he doubles back to find him peering down a side street.

He means to grab Brighton and get moving again, but the street itself catches his gaze. It’s pale, elegant, familiar. He swears it’s familiar somehow.

“That seem right to you?” Brighton says, kicking at the cobbles.

Cobblestones. John takes another look at the white-stone street, which he knows because he once walked along it in Paris.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, and blinks hard. “Keep moving.”

They walk until John’s side aches and Brighton is swaying on his feet. He’s mute, staring around with wide eyes.

Finally they come to a park John recognizes. He heads for the gate and leads Brighton in among the green. They pass benches, a dry fountain, and, far off to the left, a bower guarded by twin stone lions. He shakes his gaze from it. He has a feeling that gap in the trees isn’t for him to use.

There’s a small stone bridge up ahead, with a circular archway that casts a shadow over the path. He hustles Brighton into the darkness. When they come out on the other side, it’s evening, and the sun is going down.

“—answer me, John, _John_,” Finch is saying in his ear. Slowly, John brings a hand to his earpiece and raises the volume.

“Finch,” he says. “I’m here. We’re fine.”

Silence. And then, “John. Your tracker signal’s re-established itself. Stay there, I’m only a few minutes away.”

“Jesus fuck,” Lee Brighton says, behind him.

“You left?” John says. “It’s safer for you at the library.”

“What the _hell_?” Brighton says.

“Oh, I brought Bear,” Finch says irritably. “And you lost your unwanted company on the other side of the city. Now stay put, Mr. Reese. I’ve got the car. I’m coming to get you.”

His tone makes it final. He’s nearly running when he enters the park gate a few minutes later, and Bear is straining on the leash. When he sees John he lets out a single sharp bark. Finch pauses, stooping to hush him.

He straightens up, and the look on his face makes John’s gut twist.

“Mr. Reese,” Finch says. “I would—I would _really_ prefer it if you didn’t go silent like that.”

For the first time it occurs to John that Finch, too, might have things he is afraid to say.

“Sorry,” John says. “I had to improvise.”

Finch gives him a narrow look and then turns to Brighton, thrusting a duffel bag into his hands.

“Um, something happened,” Brighton says. “There was a, a place—”

“You took the quiet road,” Finch says. John stares.

“What?” Brighton shakes his head. “I don’t—sorry, what?”

“It’s not important,” Finch says, calculated briskness in his tone. “What’s important is that Lee Brighton disappeared under unusual circumstances after making some poor choices. Michael Reynolds, however, has a flight to Brisbane in a few hours.”

Brighton is quick on the uptake. He rifles through the bag and pulls out a pristine and extremely illegal passport. “Brisbane?” he says. “I’ve never been. Heard it’s nice.”

“Russo?” John says, pulling himself out of his suddenly disjointed thoughts.

“The police are going to pay him a visit,” Finch tells him. “They’ll find quite a bit to interest them.”

John takes that in. “We were gone longer than I thought,” he says.

The look Finch gives him is darkly satisfied. “Long enough,” he says.

In Brighton’s current state it doesn’t take much work to bundle him into a cab bound for LaGuardia. He’s leery of the shadows, staying just a few steps behind John, and when he gets into the cab’s lit interior he shuts his eyes and leans back against the headrest. John, Finch, and Bear stand on the sidewalk and watch the cab pull away.

John studies Finch out of the corner of his eye. Finch pretends not to notice. They turn and make their way westward, toward the river, toward the point where they depart from one another.

They walk for two blocks amid the shadowed but not speechless hum of the city, which is alive with desires and fears and a million less consequential things, all of them dreamlike to John tonight. Only the Machine hears them all. Finally he gives up trying to be careful.

“You take the quiet road home,” he says. “That’s why I always lose you. I can’t believe I never noticed.”

“Really,” Finch says. His tone is noncommittal but his sidelong glance is alert and almost inviting.

“I shouldn’t be surprised that you know about it,” John says, trying to ask without asking.

“I walked there for the first time on the day that I was injured,” Finch says, touching the side of his neck lightly. “I had to leave the triage area in rather a hurry. It seems that the quiet road is most accessible to those who don’t wish to be found.”

“It’s still New York,” John says. But whether he’s asking or telling, he’s not quite sure.

“I think so,” Finch says. “I think it’s the city—in potential. Unfolding inside itself, endlessly, like a fractal. When I created the Machine, I began to realize that there was so much more—” He breaks off, looking straight ahead as he walks.

“Well, I didn’t set out to be a futurist,” he says finally. “But perhaps the world’s always been this strange.”

“You sound like Brighton,” John tells him. “You heard his whole spiel. Do you believe him?”

Finch hums to himself, thinking. “The phrasing was unusual, but at its core, Mr. Brighton’s philosophy is something humans have wished to believe for as long as we’ve been alive,” he says. “That the universe is not random. That our actions, however small, are part of something larger.”

“That we’re not alone,” John says. “And you didn’t answer my question. Do you believe him?”

“I believe,” Finch says, “that there is always more to astonish us.”

_More for us_, John thinks, like if he repeats it to himself enough times it will be true. The idea of leaving Finch at the next intersection, and then doubling back to follow and lose him, seems like a terribly lonely thing to look forward to. It’s unsatisfying. It’s been unsatisfying for a long time.

“Where do you go at night?” he asks.

Finch stops walking. “You haven’t figured it out by now, Mr. Reese?” he says.

And now he’s looking hard at John, as if it’s that or flee—his other hand comes up, never free of that slight tremor. It hovers in the air between them.

“I’ve been a little preoccupied,” John says. Finch nearly laughs at that, eyes crinkling at the corners. He looks surprised at himself.

John thinks of the city he has come to know so well, mostly by nearly dying in it. He used to think there were no other possible lives he could live: only the one, tattered, driven towards a foregone ending. But instead of cutting his path off, life keeps on giving him choices.

It’s borrowed time. He knows it’s borrowed time. But it keeps on opening up before him.

“We’re never really alone, are we?” he says.

“No,” Finch says.

“Then you might as well take me home with you,” John tells him.

Finch slumps toward him a little, smiling his half-smile. Tired, perhaps, of holding out against potential. He reaches the rest of the way for John’s hand and takes it, twining their fingers tight.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Keep your eyes on me.”

When he starts walking again, they fall into step together.

**Author's Note:**

> so, this is a weird little thing - I rediscovered it while cleaning out my drafts folder and gave it a quick polish. person of interest is actually pretty well suited to my favorite fantasy trope: that cities have eyes of their own, and are alive in ways we can't see. any sufficiently advanced system is...indistinguishable from a god, I guess?
> 
> the book John's reading is _Invisible Cities_ by Italo Calvino.


End file.
